


Le Fabuleux Destin d'Elisa Esposito

by Elisif



Category: Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain | Amélie (2001), The Shape of Water (2017)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-01
Updated: 2018-03-01
Packaged: 2019-03-25 18:36:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,603
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13840620
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elisif/pseuds/Elisif
Summary: In English, despite the title. The Shape of Water retold in the style of Amélie.





	Le Fabuleux Destin d'Elisa Esposito

-On September 3, 1921  6:28 pm and 32 sec a butterfly of the Calliphorides species, whose wings can flutter  14670 times per minute beat its wings while passing unusually low over the remote alpine source of the widest river on earth, causing the stream to bubble just the slightest bit faster than usual, sending a ripple out which would echo through a fifth of the freshwater on earth, through each and every droplet as they journeyed down a million tributaries and rivulets down to the eternally singing sea. 

At the very same instant, far across land and distant ocean, a nun speaking her evening prayers while a thunderstorm threatened to shake the windows of her cell from their very panes (though sinfully thinking not of God, but of a lover lost in the trenches of the Great War), heard the faint telltale gasp that precedes an infant crying coming the storm outside, and dropped her rosary to leap up and open the shutters to the tempest beyond. 

...

Elisa is seven. Her confines, the orphanage. She likes: sleeping under the line of little blue waves she drew herself on the slats of the bunk above her in the orphanage dormitory; throwing stranded crabs and and starfish she finds back into the sea on the occasional orphanage outings to the Maryland seashore; the scuffed copy of Anderson’s Fairy Tales she took from the mobile library one day and MEANT to give back, she promises, but she loves it too much, even the way the hard spine presses into her cheek from beneath her pillow at night where she has hidden it. 

_.._ is seven flood tides. His confines: the river and sometimes the reeds he is still speckled enough to be hidden in while his mother hunts, though he is too old to ride in her hair while she swims. He likes: sitting beside her while she combs her hair with a crab shell and sings about the river and the rain or sometimes about the butterflies; chewing on the sugarcane sticks the land-people sometimes leave for them in piles on the shoreline; watching the land-people on the shore dance in the moonlight at night, the strange sound of their voices slippery like mud, entrapping. Their own language is like coarse sand; rough enough that you know it will not trap you, but his people associate rough textures with health and smooth ones with unpleasantness and disease. 

She is eight. She likes: dresses with bows on them; pretending that if she concentrates hard enough, she can part water like Moses and separate the porridge bowls of all the other children in the breakfast hall; putting her hands in the matron’s high heels and clopping them together when she polishes them. Dismissed as Simple by the nuns and matron of the orphanage for her inability to speak and kept out of school, ignored by the other children, her refuge is the world she makes up. In her world, vinyl records are made the same way as pancakes; buildings sink slowly into the ground which is why old ones have to be dug up by archaeologists; airplanes go faster than cars because they have six wheels instead of four; and if two people pick each other up at just the same moment, they will fly.

He is ten flood tides, one for each finger. He likes: wrestling over a hollowed tortoise-shell with the other children; swimming right through the treetops when the river floods; the sound of the rain from below the river. The others sometimes slip away to the land-people settlement upstream to watch them dance and carry out their strange activities by the river, but Older Sister once did so and came back with an arrowshaft in her leg, so he is not allowed. One day though, he slips away anyway and hides with the others in the reeds, taking turns poking their heads above ground and watching the humans’ festivities, listening to their strange music. As the crowning of their celebration, the villagers tear up pictures of faces and throw the scraps into the river until the surface is choked with little pieces of dour looking visages, here an eye, there an ear. The young river-people watch the festivities from below, watch the clear river surface transform into a collage of broken faces from the sandy bottom far below, for just a moment before the thousands of scraps disintegrate, and they must hide from view. Further upriver the land-people know their river counterparts, sometimes pause and toss them a piece of fruit or a welcome wave, but these are the town-people and the river-children know they must stay hidden. Until a woman spots them, and the other children dive and flee, but he remains, petrified with his hands upon the rocks. Her dress is white and surrounds her like a cloud; in the dark night, she looms against the darkness like a waning moon, and locks eyes with the blue-scales river child among the reeds. They stare for a long moment, bridging the two worlds, then the priestess reaches into her dress, lifts out what look like shiny white squares and drops them into the water. He gathers them up; the cards are made of smooth material which does not come apart in the water and they are shiny, full of pretty golds and silvers. The people on them have white skin and circles of gold around their heads like lily pads. One is of a man with blood upon his hands; another a man against a black background reading a book. When he looks up,the woman in white is gone. 

He hides the cards in the hollow stump of a mangrove, visits them occasionally, his secret  treasure; keeps them to himself.

She is ten. Like every year, the cat-eyed matron takes the children to the bishop’s fund-raising picnic, hoping to discover a generous benefactor for an orphanage. Instead, the matron discovers a Brazilian rubber baron with a fondness for love poetry, and elopes with him on a cargo plane full of smuggled rubber boots a week later.

Alas, it is not fortune and fame that greets the Matron south of the equator, but a swarm of piranhas. Only her boots return, and for a time they sit on a little polished stand in the hall of the orphanage. She and the other orphans take turns polishing them, and it is this chore that young Elisa is doing as punishment one day when the authorities arrive and transfer the rest of the orphans and the staff to a new, shinier orphanage. But the orphanage’s secret foundling was not on their list, and they leave her behind. 

That night the janitor, who was once a literature professor specialising in plays but fell far in the Depression, arrives at the foreclosed orphanage to check the gas metre and receives the fright of his life when a little girl with scars on her neck and no voice, looking like a porcelain doll abandoned in a garden so its fine clothes had faded to brown in the sun, taps him on the shoulder and tries to sell him a bundle of messily picked violets.

She had it all figured out for herself; she would sell the violets and other flowers she picked from the orphanage garden to buy cream soda and eggs and live in the orphanage all by herself and go to bed at midnight and listen to the radio in the kitchen whenever she wanted. 

But the Janitor has other plans, and he takes her home to his wife. They give her second and third helpings of meatloaf and ambrosia pudding and a beautiful red and green dress with a bow their daughter outgrew and take her to the movies to see Shirley Temple for the very first time. The next day they let her pick nasturtiums and raspberries in the garden while they talk over iced tea in hushed voices. She is wearing the raspberries like little caps on her fingertips when the workman's wife comes over with a book of sign language, kneels down and begins teaching her to sign  _ E L I S A _ , the touch of her name at last as sticky on her palms and fingers with sweet red juices as any forbidden fruit.

_ Elisa Esposito. _ E voila.

_... _

The one thing _.._ ever really enjoys anymore is tearing faces out of newspapers. One of his torturers has taken to abandoning them on the damp floor of the Asset-Room, every morning after he reads them beside the tank while smoking his cigar, so painful on _.._’s desperately sensitive lungs. Sometimes this man tries to threaten _.._ by rolling them up into a weapon, hits him with them, but that is a kind weapon compared to the tip of his cigar he sometimes uses, so he thinks little of it. But one day he realisesd the discarded papers the torturer abandoned beside the tank are full of pictures of faces. He formulates a plan, and even the simple action of something, anything to break the torturous isolation that clouds his mind like silt is like seeing the river again. Day after day, he tears out the pieces of the newspapers with faces on them, hides them in a crevice near the back of the tank. On the day when he has collected hundreds of them- or he believes it is day, he cannot know- he shreds them, scatters them on the surface of the water and dives below. In his prison, he lies upon the disease-smooth metallic floor and watches the faces drift by and disintegrate above, pretends he can hear the land-people’s drums echo through the waves, pretends the other children are just waiting in the reeds for him. Pretends they still live. Pretends he can hear voices, see lights in a language he understands. For a moment, he even hears music from the shallows.

When the last face above him disintegrates, he sees a woman in a white dress dancing in the room beyond his cell while music plays. And for a moment, the sediment in his mind clears and he can once more see the river for all the greatness of the silt-cloud sea. 

_... _

_ It is the 2nd of august 1962, exactly three days before the event which will change Elisa’s life forever, but for the moment she is oblivious of this.  _

Like any other day, she goes about her morning routine. 

_ Elisa likes: tapping her heels together when she puts her shoes away; using her little finger to lick the cream that bubbles over the top when you open a can of condensed milk; the way cats blink when theyère about to yawn. _

She packs her lunch, drops the saucepan in the sink; puts on her favourite heels, tucks her ugly but comfortable work shoes under her arm, and finger-combs her hair.

_ Elisa doesn’t like: getting a popcorn kernel stuck in the back of your throat; when your sleeves roll down while you’re washing dishes; people who assume she cannot hear them.  _

“Morning Elisa!” 

_ Morning Giles _ , she signs. 

_ Giles likes organising his sweater vests in individual paper envelopes; looking up at a yellow umbrella against the grey sky; getting a last bit of paint out of a dried-out tube of oil paint. _

Giles accompanies her down through the lobby of the cinema, out into the still-dark streets to the bus, offers that she share his telltale yellow umbrella, but she refuses, longs to feel the rain on her skin. 

“The rain never perturbs your cheer, does it?” he says, rhetorically, offering her a barley sugar from a crinkled paper in his pocket, which she takes. 

_ Giles doesn’t like: pencils that break when you try and sharpen them; when the wind turns your umbrella inside out; the sound of a cat coughing up a hairball.  _

Elisa drops her coins into the machine, finger combs her soaked hair as she heads to the back of the bus, puts her purse against the wall and rests her head against it for the long, long commute. 

When she arrives, Zelda has already clocked her in ahead of time. 

_ Zelda likes: the smell of frying onions and garlic;  the moment of silence when you drive under a bridge on a rainy day; watching coffee change colour as you stir it and the cream dissolves.  _

“You’re in the Asset-Room again today, unfortunately. Hopefully you won’t have to pick up any fingers.” Zelda tosses her a pained smile. 

_ Zelda doesn’t like: when men at work miss the toilet seat; recipes that suggest combining both sweet jello and tuna fish; people who don’t know how to clap on the beat.   _

Elisa pushes the cleaning cart down the hallway, which smells acridly of disinfectant. Shifting a little nervously from foot to foot remembering last time- the blood and the severed fingers in her sandwich bag- she unlocks the door and determinedly pushes the cart inside. 

_ Elisa doesn’t have anyone in her life. She tried once or twice, but the result didn’t reach the heights she hoped for. Instead she cultivates a taste for the small joys of life: pleasuring herself in the bath, imagining herself as the star of hollywood musicals, and collecting laminated saint’s cards from catholic churches around Baltimore and pinning them over the cracks in her walls. _

_ And finally, here at 11:16 pm august 31st, 1963. The event that will change Elisa Esposito’s life forever. _

The telltale bell marking the end of her shift rings; Elisa takes a small transistor radio out of her purse, sets it on the shelf to play the news while she searches through her purse for a snack. The static crackles, and then:

_ “Screen icon Marilyn Monroe has been found dead in bed at her Los Angeles home. _

_ The 36-year-old actress' body was discovered in the early hours of this morning by two doctors who were called to her Brentwood home by a concerned housekeeper-” _

In shock at the news, Elisa drops her purse; the contents spill far across the newly cleaned floor, and she gets down on her hands and knees to gather them up while the radio continues.

_ “The doctors were forced to break into Miss Monroe's bedroom after being unable to open the door. She was found lying in her bed with an empty bottle of Nembutal sleeping pills by her side-” _

When Elisa next looks up, she finds herself face to face and eye to eye with the creature. 

It has climbed out of the tank, so far as the chain around its neck will let it; in its hands, it is holding her most recent Saint’s Card find, a picture of Saint Anthony of Padua leaning over a book against a dull black background.

The other contents of her purse still strewn about- shiny keys and lipsticks, her wallet, a paperback book, a candy bar with a shining silver wrapper- remain ignored. But not the card. 

Until now, while she had regarded the creature in the Asset-Room with a deep, abiding pity, it was a pity such as she would have felt passing by a house with a guard dog on too short a chain out in front. But this; the look in its eyes as it stares down at the card is not just human. It is achingly,  _ nakedly _ human, suffused with longing and memory and pain such that she cannot bear it, and she feels as intrusive as if she had found herself spying upon an ageing widow in a cemetery. 

She looks ashamedly away, gathers up the contents of her purse. 

The creature meets her eyes. 

_ You keep it _ , she signs with her hands, and runs from the Asset-Room, slamming the door behind her. 

When Elisa gets home, she goes straight to Giles’ apartment, turns on the tea kettle and collapses onto the sofa. 

“Bad day?” he asks her. 

_ No worse than usua _ l, she signs back.  _ They had me clean the Asset-Room again.  _

“They still have that thing chained up in there?” 

She nods. Giles sighs and goes back to his painting. For the fifteenth year that Elisa has known him, Giles is repainting Renoir’s  _ The Oarsmen’s Breakfast _ . 

“The hardest part is the glances,” he says, talking to himself really. “A stroke too much shadow or light, and instead of resentment, you’ve got love… Sometimes I have the feeling that they change their expressions as soon as my back is turned.”

“After all these years, the one person I still don’t understand is the girl with the glass of the water. She’s in the middle of it all, and yet somehow she’s still an outsider.”

He turns back to her. 

_ Maybe’s she’s different from the others,  _ Elisa signs. 

“In what way?”

_ I don’t know. _

“She doesn’t really know how to form relationships. She’s never known how. When she was younger, she didn’t often play with other children. Perhaps never.”

_ What about the young man behind her? With the cigarette. He looks as lonely as she does,  _ she signs. 

“It’s a shame they can’t speak to each other. But they’re both trapped, frozen in oil and acrylic. But what if she were to seek him out? What do you think he would say?”

  
  


_ All of a sudden Elisa feels completely at peace with herself. Suddenly everything is perfect… the soft lights, the scent in the air, The quiet murmuring of the city. She breathes deeply. Life seems so easy and clear to her: she is overcome by a surge of love, a desire to help all humanity. And some things that while not quite humanity, are certainly closer to it rather than further.  _

The next morning, she packs her bag with an additional three boiled eggs and a portable turntable. 

One year later

_ Why do you have these?  _ He finally signs one day, pointing at the line of saint’s cards she has pinned to the molding that circles the bathroom. 

_ They were some of the only things I had, growing up in the orphanage because the nuns gave them to us. I like them.  _

_ What does that sign mean?  _ he asks.  _ Orphanage.  _

She tries hard to explain the concept of an institution, but he does not understand. Why would parents ever abandon a child? And why would their family group not take it if they did so?

_ A place for people who are all alone in the world, _ she finally settles on. 

_ Like this apartment, like you and I, _ he signs with a smile, like she taught him to make the gesture.

She looks around the small bathroom; the stack of dusty plastic-wrapped library books beside the bath, the collection of perfume bottles on top of the sink, the red silk curtains she sewed herself. 

_ No, not like this,  _ she signs.

_ Show me.  _

So they count the days until the rain, until it rains so hard that _.._ can breathe freely in the open and Elisa can dance barefoot through the moonlit streets without the glances of strangers, and she shows him. Hand in hand, they dance through the silver-tinged streets, out to the shabby docks, past the abandoned red warehouses of the factories, along the promenade of abandoned fairground rides and sealed-off crabcake shacks and boathouses, old white paint peeling from their sides, the echoes of happy childhoods long ago washing shining pebbles to glass as they roll in and out with the tides, while all the while the rain erodes the surviving colours of this place to the sea, leaving only the bare and discoloured skeletons that supported so many memories behind.

But they walk beyond that, to an lonely boarded up warehouse that says “condemned” in red peeling letters on the door, and Elisa shows _.._ how to sneak in through an open back window, hitching up her soaked green skirt to sit upon the windowsill and pull him up beside her, before they jump down into the dust. 

This was a bedroom once; small abandoned bedframes line the walls, some bunkbeds, some not; moonlight throws shadows across the cold linoleum floor and empty mattresses, ceilings high enough to swallow any notions of coziness and let the rain echo through that looming emptiness. 

They know each other’s body language well enough now; as they wander the halls of the abandoned orphanage, he feels her tightness and shame, sees her averted gaze and regret at having allowed him to see the sorrow of the place which raised her, the sadness which seeps from the very walls and floors from generations of suffering; she in turn can identify what must be his bafflement at imagining a childhood in such a place. Compared to his own formative years, in that timeless paradise of flood-pool and liana, canopy and riverbank, lush and teeming with life of every kind, green as far as the eye could see, life without time or discipline... These dour brown walls, fading sepia photos of children in matching uniforms, dusty linoleum floors. How could a spirit like Elisa’s have been carried through such halls without withering?

What monster would ever lock up a child in a place like this?

Elisa places her hand upon his arm. She signs:

_ They… did not believe I could understand them. They did not know that I was just like them in my mind, and trapped. I was so alone, always, so very alone with my thoughts for so many years. Until finally someone rescued me and taught me to sign, sent me to a school of other people like me, taught me to speak with my hands in return… Gave me language. Gave me a life. A life away from all this.  _

_ You were just like I was once. And that is why you saved me.  _

_ Yes. _

_ Only for you, there was no before. There was no river before the silt in your head. For you, there is only now. _

She takes his hand.

...

After that, he starts to explain his own language to her. 

Three sounds she renders as tS-B-Qa, make _ water _ . But tS-  _ blue light _ \- B-Qa is _ river _ . tS-quick blue flash- B-slow blue flash- Qa- quick blue flash makes  _ swam _ . Basic concepts can be carried up to miles away in sound alone, and the listener can guess the true meaning with relative ease. But to truly KNOW each individual word the speaker chose, not to simply guess them, the listener must be close enough to  _ see _ . The meaning rendered in sound alone is to their language what banging two rocks together is to an orchestra. But even seeing and hearing is little, one voice compared to a choir. There is the pattern of the lights themselves and which part of the body they appear on, their precise shade and their speed, none of which can be seen in murky depths. Finally, there is the heat and warmth of the lights themselves, the highest level of semantic specificity, which can only be understood through one medium: touch. 

Thus to them, true understanding of meaning is deepest intimacy, wanton, craven intimacy. It takes him time to adjust to the notion of writing when she introduces it.  _ Why would I want to understand the thoughts of someone far away in complete words? It is obscene. If I wanted to know, I would go to them, and I would let them touch me. _

_ Our elders would say that by reading these words, I would have to marry their writer,  _ he says, another time. They watch  _ Singin In the Rain  _ one night, and he asks if all the fuss is because because precise speech in films is too vulgar a concept for their elders to accept.

It is more reason to love her, he admits. He does not understand the English words they spoke while they tortured him. But if he did, if he knew any more than that they meant to cause pain, that would make him kin to them. And by deepest law, kin must be forgiven. For this, he fears understanding English, so crudely intimate in how it surrenders meaning. But it is not English Elisa taught him or English that Elisa shapes into his palm long into the night. 

...

Zelda and Giles are visiting; the four of them all cram into Elisa’s tiny kitchen and Giles slices cabbage for coleslaw and Zelda fries crabcakes for them all from her mother’s recipe. The cramped room is soon sweltering and Elisa pulls a half-empty coke from the fridge, tops it up with rum, takes a swig and passes it to Zelda; she and Giles start singing “Rum and Coca Cola” as they work, and Elisa translates the lyrics of the song and other things they say for _.._into ASL with rushed fingers while she leans back against the counter.

Zelda jams the spatula under a stuck and sizzling crabcake and the oil splutters, splashes her hand. 

“You fucking bastard!” she shouts. _.._flinches at the words, looks to Elisa for direction and instinctively she translates back.  _ You fucking bastard. _

There is an uncomfortable pause, and then she realises what she has done. 

Furiously, he signs:

_ Why did you tell me those words? I know their sound! I did not wish to know their meaning!  _

_ You promised you would not translate english directly! Only say things in your language! _

_ There is no other way to say that in ASL! Our languages do not work like yours! You cannot avoid English forever! It is what people here speak! _

_ Those men who captured me all spoke english!  _

_ But you know what? They also lived in houses and wore clothes and ate toast for breakfast and sang and laughed! One person doing something does not curse it forever! It is different here! _

They are signing furiously now. Giles and Zelda shrink further back into the corner. 

Gesticulating wildly, she signs:

_ Leave! Go! Go back to your bath leave! _

  
  


Elisa is resting with her feet up on the coffee table and a compress on her forehead when _.._ returns to Giles’ living room later that night.

_ I want to know _ , he signs at her.  _ Something one of them always said, over and over. I want to know what it means. What it meant.  _

She glances at Giles, then gives _.._ a nod. His vocal chords are not designed for human speech, and the imitation of the words is a loose cacophony of sounds, but the rhythm can be identified, and Giles knows it at once, if Elisa does not.

“Tyger, Tyger. William Blake.” Giles says. “Bottom left of the shelf.”

Elisa jumps up, fetches the book, thumbs through the yellowing pages at _.._’s side. Fingers trembling, she signs out the words for him as she reads.

_ Tyger Tyger burning bright,  _

_ In the forests of the night:  _

_ What immortal hand or eye,  _

_ Dare frame thy fearful symmetry? _

_ What the hammer? what the chain,  _

_ In what furnace was thy brain? _

_ What the anvil? what dread grasp,  _

_ Dare its deadly terrors clasp? _

_ When the stars threw down their spears  _

_ And water'd heaven with their tears:  _

_ Did he smile his work to see? _

_ Did he who made the Lamb make thee? _

_ Tyger Tyger burning bright,  _

_ In the forests of the night:  _

_ What immortal hand or eye, _

_ Dare frame thy fearful symmetry? _

The silence is cold as she finishes, lays her hand over the page as one might on the brow of a sick friend. 

_ What does it mean _ , he asks, and she dreads to answer.

_ The writer…  _ she finally signs.  _ He wants to know, how a loving God who made lambs and cats and fields and trees could make something he does not understand. How the same god could make things he understands and things he does not. Things that are beautiful and things that he believes are ugly. _

_ -..- Do you understand? _

_ He smiles, and signs: _

_ The God who made Strickland’s hands also made Elisa Esposito dance with flowers in her hair. _

_... _

  
  


Elisa sleeps on a pallet beside the bathtub. It is pitch-black, but in the silence they chatter all night long in their clutched fingers like children. He tells her about the white-robed priestess with the card. About his home, his family. His sister whose name meant “mangrove flower” who so loved shiny things, bits of foil, bottle-caps, shiny wire, she would journey upstream for days to the edge of a town just to collect them. How one day she returned home and became deathly sick, her breath clouded white, her hands spasming and he sought to find the cards he had hidden in the mangrove just so he could give her something that shined. How when he came back the water breathed of blood and there was no one of his family or village to be found. 

_ Did she lead me here? H _ e signs.  _ Did the woman in white lead me to you?  _

_... _

_ Elisa. I must know. _

_ What? _

_ Who was it who hurt you? _

He runs his fingers gently along the sharp scars along her neck as she leans in against his chest with her eyes closed, soft and naked in the bath beside him. . Their rough touch is beautiful to him, but the scars themselves are a horror, so long and deep. He wonders. 

His species can mend themselves of almost any traumatic injury, it is true- but only the adults. Their children cannot mend their own injuries, nor can they have them mended by others; healing a serious injury requires that both healer and victim have a full ability to communicate in touch and light, and their children do not acquire the full ability to communicate by means other than sound until adulthood. As such, the young of his species are as vulnerable as minnows, must rely on sheer luck if they fall hurt or ill. Because of this, the adults of his kind uniformly protect their young from possible injuries and threats with almost incalculable ferocity. A dozen adults would and will die to save just one child from hurt, even if they were not related to it. How anyone could ever hurt a child of their own kind is beyond his comprehension.

_ I will find him, and I will tear out his throat in return,  _ he tells her with his hands. 

_ I do not know, _ she signs.  _ I was found by the orphanage like this. I do not know how it happened.  _

_ Then let me find some other evil man, and tear his throat out in your name. It would only be right. _

_ _.._ no! Not like that. Please. _

_ Humans can be so cruel. I cannot bear to think they hurt you like they hurt me. _

_ No _.._ it was nothing like that. I do not even remember. _

He rarely speaks of the intervening years. He does not even know how many there were, how long they lasted. 

_ In my mind, I was already dead. Starved and half-mad, I thought I was dying at last when I first saw you. _

_ So kind a heart. So beautiful. _

_ Elisa, how long does a human live? _

She breathes deeply and leans in close against his chest, feels his chest rise and and fall. Entwines his fingers, reluctant to loosen them, though the tightness of their present grip rendersher mute twice over. 

_ “Not long. Seventy, eighty years maybe.” _

His hands are silent.

_ How old are you? _

_ Forty. _

_ Half gone, already. _

_ How long do your people live? _

_ Longer. We die, but we do not grow old. _

_ … _

Once Elisa teaches _.._ to read, he takes to it so voraciously Zelda jokes he should apply to study literature at Harvard. All day he reads; at night Elisa sits beside him and goes with him over tome upon tome, explaining strange words, concepts, human tendencies and oddities. He exhausts Giles’ small library, and Elisa begins bringing armfuls of books from the library home with her each night. 

It is a typical evening. Giles painting, Zelda engrossed in a novel, Elisa and _.._ seated side by side on the sofa going over a book of poems, Elisa transcribing along when the words become too strange.

“I should do that,” says Giles. 

_ What? _

“I was reading your fingers. _ In Xanadu did Kubla Khan, A stately pleasure-dome decree: Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea.  _ I should join those Hippie folks. Go to Afghanistan. Nepal. Tibet. Become a Buddhist.”

_ Smoke leaf _ , signs _.._

It is his first ever attempt at a joke, and it lands well. All three of them burst out laughing. 

“Well then,” Giles wheezes, “I tell you, if I get a sign, I’ll give Zelda the cats and go see the world. But only if.”

_ Elisa squeezes _.._’s fingers.  _

_ Where did you learn that?  _ she signs. 

_ I watched the news, _ he signs. Then, 

_ Proud. Happy to be with all of you. _

_... _

Elisa unlocks the door of the bathroom, sits down on her pallet and kicks off her shoes, kisses _.._’s cheek and leans over to see what he is reading. She recognises Giles’ favourite book of poetry, a rare and beautiful copy she knows he treasures. 

_.._ reads English fluently now, but still out of instinct, Elisa signs out the words of the poem to him as she leans against the bath beside him. 

_ O bright magnolia, bursting in the foam _

_ Magnetic transience whose death blooms,  _

_ And vanishes-being nothingness- forever;  _

_ Broken salt, dazzling lurch of the sea.  _

_ You and I, Love, together we ratify the silence, while the sea destroys his perpetual statues,  _

_ Collapses in towers of wild speed and whiteness;  _

_ Because in the weavings of those invisible fabrics, galloping water, incessant sand _

_ We make the only permanent tenderness... _

To keep books dry, _.._ holds them in a resealable bag and uses a chopstick inserted in the bag to change the pages. But as he is attempting to do so, his body is racked by a shuddering cough, his hands slip and he drops the plastic bag containing the beautiful book of poems into the bath. 

_.._’s chest heaves with illness and he collapses back against the wall of the bath coughing madly; Elisa snatchses the ruined book out of the bath, wraps it in a bathtowel and sets it aside before instantly turning to _.._ in panic. 

_ That…  was Giles favourite book,  _ he signs, gasping for breath, as she lays her hand on his forehead, fusses over him. 

Elisa’s heart hurts for the ruined book, but she is far more concerned for _.._’s health, as he falls sickly against the back of the bathroom wall. Every day he is worse. 

_ It is ok,  _ she signs.  _ We will find a bookstore and get him another copy. Everything will be fine.  _

She picks up a flashlight she keeps besisde her pallet and spells his name in light _. _.._  _ Weakly, he signs _ “SMILE” at her,  _ before breathing heavily.

_ _.._ ... _

_ The way we breathe…   _ he signs _ , with our whole bodies. .. It makes us vulnerable to poison. So easily. _

_ Is it the water? Is it poisoned? Is it the salt? _

_ I do not know. Elisa. You have done everything right here. It is not you. I will be alright, with time. Smile.  _

Elisa releases some of her tension, steps back, and begins to towel off the destroyed poetry book to see if she can salvage it. 

It is at that moment that Giles runs in on them shouting “He’s coming for you! We have to go, now, now, now! Run!”

_... _

_ Her blood pours into his arms and chest. He can taste it, breathe its ugly metallic warmth as it seeps across his skin and against his utterest control his body tries to make use of discarded oxygen in her drenching blood and he breathes more freely than he has in years for it. Elisa, Elisa he signs into her palm in her language, for her eyes are closed as she lies across his lap. Elisa. Do not leave me, Stop. Elisa. You will live. You will dance again with flowers in your hair. I will dance with you. Elisa. Do not leave.  _

_ You cannot heal a mortal wound without an intimate bond, a voice of an elder from his youth echoes in his mind. You can heal small things, but not a great injury, because you cannot heal someone unless you can talk to and understand each other through touch alone. You cannot heal with sound. Sound is not enough to save someone. They must understand you fully by warmth and touch.  _

_ Elisa understands. Elisa alone in perhaps all the world understands him. But Elisa is a human, and she cannot speak back to him in his language though he has learned hers with his hands . He has no way of knowing if that will be enough, if anything can now be enough. Nevertheless, he tries. With all his might, he squeezes the word “heal” into her palm in a pattern of light and heat as the sea swallows them and his lungs fill for the first time in so long. _

_ _/_/_.. Heal. He tells her and over over, in flashes of warm on his hands, as her blood pours into his arms. _/_/_.. _/_/_.., please. _/_/_…  _

_ He sinks deeper. The pressure of the icy water pushes his arms around her into an even tighter embrace as the light dissipates. _/_/_.._/_/_.. _

_ _/_/_.. _

_ _.._ _

_ _.._ _

_ Suddenly, in his palm, he feels the sound of his own name. His own name. Spoken truly for the first time in so many years, spoken back to him in touch at long last.  _

_ He opens his eyes. There are speckles of warm blue lights on Elisa’s hands. He lifts them, and her eyes are open. The scars on her neck have transformed into gills, and she is breathing. Healing. Alive.  _

_ He is loath to let go of her hands, but he does. Beneath the sea, in her language, he signs: _

_ I did not believe I could heal you. How did you know? How did you ever understand what I was telling you? _

_ She takes his hand, and in his language, palm to palm, she touches back: _

_ _.._. You taught it to me.  _

 

_ Epilogue: _

Giles flips through his mail, flicks through leaflet after leaflet, almost misses the thin letter at the bottom with a foreign stamp of a palm tree. 

He tears it open with the point of a paintbrush. Inside are two filmsy black and white photos from a disposable camera. 

On the first, is his favourite book of poems- that one that so strangely disappeared- lying on Ipanema- or is it Copacabana?- beach in Rio. The crest of Sugarloaf mountain is clearly visible in the background. 

The second photograph is of the book laid open upon the sand, open to one of his favourite poems. 

Fingers trembling ever so slightly, he reads:

_ At last, to end, do not return to your sea-stone. _

_ Ocean Lady, my soul, southern amber and grace. _

_ On our ships, our earth, we receive _

_ The pollen and fish of distant isles _

_ Listening, listening to the faraway whisper and barcarole _

_ The sunrise ritual of lost oars. _

_ Ocean Lady, I am just someone who hoped for you _

_ In the tower of an ethereal lighthouse. _

_ And this is the story where only one tide surges… _

_ Your aquamarine breasts beneath the night’s radiance. _

_ There are only two truths in this sonata: _

_ Your two dark eyes _

_ Open _

_ Beneath the sea. _

**Author's Note:**

> Shoutouts to Jeane-Pierre Jeunet and Guillaume Laurent, Mervyn Peake, William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Pablo Neruda and everyone else I managed to somehow reference in this.  
> The final poem is Part XI of Pablo Neruda's "Ocean Lady".  
> The poem Elisa and _.._ read in the bath is Sonnet XI from Pablo Neruda's One Hundred Love Sonnets collection.


End file.
